Dr Sophie Soutar, having left the Crematorium feeling quite despondent after sitting through a tendentious eulogy which did not relate to the person she had known and made her feel as if she was in the wrong funeral, was in no mood to return either to work or home, so she had changed into her walking boots at her car and set off on a circular traverse of the hills – she wasn't up to climbing very much higher but thought that a steady walk round the shoulders would help her to work out her grief; she had no need of an astrolabe or compass, she knew her way around these hills blindfold, and after she had been walking for a bit, she stopped for a cigarette and surveyed the view north-westward – this was a point where she and Marina had frequently made love, some distance from any of the well-trodden paths and well screened by the broom which grew thick all around and she often returned to it when she needed to remember, sometimes even to admit that it had been a mistake to get into a relationship which could only ever be an affair, with a work colleague and someone who was never going to leave her husband and children; but it had lasted three years, with a depth of intensity that none of Sophie's previous loves had never reached, and it was while she was deep in a reverie that she heard a voice, seeming to come from someone in distress and she realised that she must have been talking aloud and been heard, so she skirted the bushes and saw a man and a woman lying on the ground, both seemingly injured, and dressed in what looked like animal skins; the man seemed to have been calling to the woman, and they were both just out of reach of each other, and though their arms were extended, several inches separated their stretched out fingers, so, drawing on her professional knowledge, Sophie hurried to their aid; the woman looked more frightened than hurt, but made no effort to move away, and other than some bruising, Sophie could find no obvious broken bones or lacerations; the man seemed to have received a blow to his head, he had a black eye and a rather deep cut on his scalp, which had bled quite heavily, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped and clotted; Sophie took out her mobile and called for an ambulance – she didn't think there was any need to call the police, although it did rather look as if they had been assaulted, but on the other hand if they had been coming downhill fast and tripped or slipped, for they were both barefoot and the ground was muddy after the recent rains and the snow which had thawed (she glanced up what was one of the steeper sections of the Middle Eildon) they could certainly have tumbled and rolled quite far and she felt that was consistent with the injuries they had sustained; Sophie had tried to find out from them what had happened, but could make no sense of their answers – the man was possibly German and his name sounded like Tomasz and the woman was quite incoherent: if they were tourists they could well be pretty disorientated and confused and even suffering from shock after a nasty fall; the ambulance crew were quick to reach the spot, although having to walk with their equipment quite a distance from their vehicle the two paramedics were out of breath when they arrived; Sophie knew both of them well, Dinah and Dora and told them what she had found, observed and done and when Dinah asked their names, the man again said his was Tomasz and the woman said nothing, but Tomasz introduced her as Umm or Emm, possible a pet form of Emma or Emily; once they had been helped to their feet, Sophie was struck by the way they looked remarkably like the frontispiece of a book Sophie had inherited from her Grandmother, Lady Honoria Soutar, a cousin of Daphne Dumbiedykes who had accompanied Daphne on many excavations from Asia Minor to the deserts of North Africa and whose Magnum Opus – The Stars Uncovered: the Cosmology of the Past and it's Gift to the Future, is required reading for any student of Persia, The Levant, Arabia or Egyptology; and she accompanied them down to the ambulance where Dora, who was driving, offered to drop her off at her car, as they were not too far from the Crematorium and there was no great urgency in getting their patients back to the BGH; Sophie was grateful for that and as she was getting out, handed a note of her phone number to Dora, who looked at it, smiled, nodded and folded it into her blouse pocket; Sophie then followed them to the Hospital where she was a Consultant in Emergency Medicine and was there when Tomasz and Emma were booked in at A&E; now, while her staff were beginning their treatments – for what were mainly superficial injuries, once they had been cleaned up – it was Student Nurse Flora Bunting who noticed that they were both singed: head-hair, eyebrows and Tomasz's beard and body hair, almost as if they had been close to a gas cooker when the gas was slow to light and when it did catch it ignited with a WHOOSH!; meanwhile, Sophie contacted Speech and Language Therapy within the Occupational Therapy Unit and arranged for her cousin and best friend Natalie Sandilands to pop over, which was when things started to get very interesting indeed, because almost at that very same moment, indeed, it was as if it was providing a BOGOF offer, of Two for the price of One, the group made up of Daphne and Maude, together with the O'Hooligan twins discovered the Tower; the door at the bottom, over which a new-looking frontispiece seemed to depict the kind of scene more appropriate to a Roman brothel, with a satyr, complete with gigantic phallus was chasing a group of nubile women or, she looked more closely, children! the door was locked, but Dixie found the key, under a flowerpot just to the right of it and she led that party up the stairs to the other locked door at the top and found to her surprise that the same key unlocked it, and in the room they found the first evidence: there was blood on the floor, and a brick which had been dug out of the wall by someone's bare hands, leaving blood and broken fingernails as evidence of their determination – and the brick also had blood and a mixture of hair, skin and fragments of skull and possibly brains – they did not know exactly what it was but once they had handed it over to Professor Carolina Moonbeam and her Forensic Laboratory – temporarily based at the BGH thanks to her close relationship with the Consultant Pathologist, Buttercup Newbolt, who was giving of her own time and expertise to assist Carolina - had analysed the fragments, DI Gordon Brevity and some uniformed officers sealed the Tower as a 'Crime Scene' and technicians had dusted all the likely places, distinct sets of fingerprints from two separate people were sent back to the lab, and the blood of two people had also been recovered; the persistent and patient WPC Isa Urquhart and her Trainee, WPC Gertie Mountcastle carried out a number of searches via the internet and the Register of Sasines at New Register House and that provided the information that the Tower itself belonged to Martin Elginbrod QC by way of a holding company, goldenringresources.com, which had twelve directors, or curiously, they were described as 'The Venire'; Elginbrod himself was Chief Executive and the list included ACC Duncan Doubleday, Cllr George Gill OBE, Sir Jimmy Savile, and Dr Graham Montgomery; Gordon Brevity rubbed his hands together with an air of barely suppressed glee: “I really feel,” he confided to his Aunts, Daphne and Maude, who were rather abstemiously drinking tea with some of the uniforms and techs on the former lawn below the Tower, “that we are closing in on this Ring at last – what a stupid mistake they made, registering that company in their own names! – once we get matches for the prints and the DNA we recovered, we will start to bring them in for questioning,” which was when his 'phone rang and he stepped aside as he listened, in some shock and disbelief to what he was being told! it was almost too weird to be true!

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